CoolColJ Posted January 14, 2000 Share Posted January 14, 2000 WHat about a 19inch TFT ? Wolfe the Sony G400 FD trinitron, is the latest model , very flat, like my E200 FD, its actually way sharper than the 400ps and 500ps It has a .24-.25 AG dot picth - your one does, .25-.27 The Tnt card I have wis more than sufficent for CM, just need more memory that's all 32 meg TNTultra would be ideal and a lot cheaper than a Matrox G400, with much better drivers, and faster speed too. ------------------ ------------------ CCJ BLITZ_Force My HomePage -----> www.geocities.com/coolcolj/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lee Posted January 14, 2000 Share Posted January 14, 2000 Yep, a good monitor will last far longer than your system will be usefully fast for state-of-the-art 3D gaming. I still have my NEC MultiSync 3D monitor from my first PC. And it's over 9 years old! At the time it was one of the best monitors you could buy and only now that the picture is getting a little degraded am I going to get a replacement. I've decided to get the best image quality 19 inch monitor I can find to take over my PC chores. As far as running 3D games at 1600x1200, I don't think it's really an issue for most 3D games. You might be able to make use of it in CM but if you were playing first-person games the requirements for high frame-rates go up tremendously. In CM if the graphics get a bit choppy you might get annoyed but in a FPS if the graphics get choppy you tend to die from it. So 1600x1200 isn't really an option for the most demanding 3D environments. In those games 1280x1024 is about the max you can run the game at anyhow without incurring serious loss of frames a sec. That isn't likely to change any time soon, so I wouldn't sweat it if your monitor can't run super high res comfortably. I'd recommend for most players to just get a very good 19 inch monitor and you'll be all set for a long time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lee Posted January 15, 2000 Share Posted January 15, 2000 Oh, and if anyone has run CM at 1600x1200 I'd be curious to know what sort of frame-rates you got. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lee Posted January 15, 2000 Share Posted January 15, 2000 Hmm, not even a few hints as to what CM runs like at that high of a res? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndyRoss Posted January 15, 2000 Share Posted January 15, 2000 My desktop's at 1600*1200@32bpp, so I suppose CM (from what I read here) runs at that resolution and colour depth. I'm one of the people who honestly admit that they cannot tell the difference between 60fps and 30fps. I've never seen any slowdown in CM: no delays in flipping views or jerky movement or anything else like that. On the other hand, I've never seen any of the larger maps first hand (the maps in the release version do appear to be considerably bigger than the demo maps), so perhaps the release version will be a little slower if there are a lot of buildings and units. However, I'd think that there will have been improvements in the graphics engine since the beta, so perhaps any slowdown will be offset. PII-450 128Mb TNT2:Xentor32 Ultra Hitachi Superscan 753 (19") Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lee Posted January 16, 2000 Share Posted January 16, 2000 Thanks for the info., that's a nice video card you have there. The very fastest of the TNT2 cards. Only the new GeForce cards are faster. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CoolColJ Posted January 16, 2000 Share Posted January 16, 2000 I just did 1600x1200@60htz at 32 bits -that's all I can do with my SOny 17 inch . Very useable! Well my SOny 17inch FD is very sharp, so I could read all the writing, every thing was nice and clean , no jaggies (well on a 17inch you want see any jaggies at 1600x1200!) - it wasn't that much slower on my normal TNT2 16 meg card, although 573 mhtz helps It is slightly more jerky, maybe running at about 35-40 fps? It still moves around the screen smoothly though - I could use it no probs! But it doesn't look that much better than 1152x868 on my 17 inch. You'd need a 19 or 21 incher to really notice. ------------------ ------------------ CCJ BLITZ_Force My HomePage -----> www.geocities.com/coolcolj/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndyRoss Posted January 16, 2000 Share Posted January 16, 2000 Now here's a weird thing While I can't see any difference between 30 and 60 fps, I cannot stand a screen refresh at anything less than 75Hz (S753 does 85Hz at 1600*1200) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug Beman Posted January 16, 2000 Share Posted January 16, 2000 Not weird, Andy. Ever notice how a flickering fluorescent light will give you a bad headache? Same principle. Refresh rates lower than ~75 produce images that flicker enough for the eyes and brain to feel it, even if you can't really see it. Refresh lower than ~60 will produce noticeable flicker, making the game hard to play (as well as giving a nasty headache) DjB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndyRoss Posted January 16, 2000 Share Posted January 16, 2000 Yeah, I realise all that. My point was that if I can't tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps (as others claim to be able to ) then it's strange that my dull sensed eyes can easily see a low quality monitor in action (or a monitor operating beyond its means, don't want to offend you sub-19" guys . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CoolColJ Posted January 16, 2000 Share Posted January 16, 2000 I certainly see the difference between refresh rates! Especially since anything above 85 htz dulls the screen somewhat, and gets slightly fuzzy. Also there is a huge difference between 30 and 60fps! I noticed this in Half Life where you can set the max fps - when I set it to 30 its jerky as heel, and bad for eyes :0 at 60 creamey smooth, there is evena subtle difference between 50 and 60 fps, but above 60 you can't notice any difference. ------------------ ------------------ CCJ BLITZ_Force My HomePage -----> www.geocities.com/coolcolj/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndyRoss Posted January 16, 2000 Share Posted January 16, 2000 I think that the monitor only dulls at very high refresh rates if its delivery of power can't keep up and only blurs if the monitor's video clock operating near max (mine's 230MHz so there's little problem there). At resolutions below 1280*768 my monitor generally does from 105Hz to 160Hz but doesn't dull or blur because it isn't working very hard at all. I've always thought that if my frame rate's 60fps I need to increase the detail settings: I can definetly see the difference between low and high detail. The only irritating thing with an average of about 30fps is that a burst of detail can easily knock the frame rate down to a noticeably jerky level. I suppose that the reason I'm comfortable with 30 is that I was a flight sim jockey for a long time, so 17fps doesn't make me flinch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lee Posted January 17, 2000 Share Posted January 17, 2000 Exactly. If you don't have an average of 60-70 fps in many games, there will come times when an unusual amount of gunfire or explosions will occur and this will cause a severe drop in fps. This isn't a problem if you have 30 frames to spare. If you don't have any frames to spare, then it can easily get you killed. Plus it's just plain irritating to be playing a cool game and have it get all choppy on you at some very interesting moment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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